Bikes can be a fine way to travel shortish distances--except when you’re hauling a lot of stuff. Take it from someone who doesn’t leave the house without a bag the size of a large carry-on. Yves Béhar’s Fuseproject to the rescue: Its new Local bike comes with enough cargo space to haul a dog, a picnic, and a large umbrella to the beach--while retaining the manageable dimensions of a standard two-wheeler.

For the second time, San Francisco industrial designer Yves Béhar has won the INDEX Award, a 100,000 Euro prize given to five life-improving design projects by a Danish nonprofit. This year, Béhar's program "See Better to Learn Better," a system for delivering attractive, affordable eyeglasses to school-age children, has been presented with one of the awards. Béhar previously won for the One Laptop Per Child XO computer in 2007.

In its ongoing efforts to bling up every major industry event, Swarovski debuted its latest design collaboration at this year’s Design Miami: "Iris," four dramatic, crystal-based representations of the human eye, by the London-based duo Fredrikson Stallard.

America's reigning industrial-design star Yves Béhar has unveiled a sleek new cell phone, which does something unheard of in the electronics industry today: It's designed to last.

As Béhar tells next month's issue of Fast Company magazine: "Instead of more, we proposed better and longer lasting. It became a way to answer questions like, 'Why do I need a new phone each year? And why does it have to be complicated?'"